That honestly hadn't occurred to me; I'm much more familiar with fields where most of the important details end up patented. I generally view all forms of intel

That honestly hadn't occurred to me; I'm much more familiar with fields where most of the important details end up patented. I generally view all forms of intellectual property (patents, trade secrets, copyrights) as nothing more than mechanisms by which to exact funding. I suppose a trade secret would prevent circumventing IP law by heading to a more permissive jurisdiction and is potentially indefinite. But then again, if anyone ever successfully reverse engineered it (or it leaked) my understanding is you can't patent it in retrospect? So it seems like a huge risk to me. From an ethical standpoint, I'm not seeing where it would be any worse than a patent (one that's actually enforced). Unless you're concerned about the possibility of the knowledge becoming lost to humanity? Or something else? An aside: I wouldn't be optimistic about the usefulness of trade secrets on their own in the biomedical sciences. It can certainly be tedious to reverse engineer something, but my impression is that it's generally the IP laws that stop your potential competition.